Tics

Saturday was Grayson's half-birthday. He's now seven and a half. This is a big deal when you're seven and a half. We measured and weighed him as we always do in March. He has grown an inch and gained a pound. He gets taller and taller. And skinnier and skinnier. His little arms are like twigs, and his shoulder blades feel like bird wings under the skin. I try not to worry about him. He's perfectly healthy and has a decent appetite, he's just using all his resources to grow.

There are a few odd habits he has acquired lately, and I guess they may be related to his growth. First is it was the finger thumping. He holds his fingers out stiff and straight and thumps them against his chest: it's like snapping, a little. He puts, for instance, the pointer finger just slightly over the middle finger and strains them against each other to make the pointer snap down against his chest. Likewise with the middle finger over the ring finger. He does it with both hands, unconsciously, while he's watching tv or reading his books.

Then he started snapping his elbows. He sort of flings his arms out, slightly hyperextending the elbows to make the joints crack. It sets my teeth on edge.

Then there's the weirdest of them all: the shoulder quiver. He will hunch up his shoulders, tip back his head and give a little grimacing quiver, like a frisson. It looks like he's just had a mild electric shock. This one freaks me out because he looks totally autistic when he does it. Like there's something really off kilter.

"Why are you doing that?" I asked finally, in alarm, a few nights ago.
"I don't know, I just (quiver) sometimes need to (quiver) do this (quiver)"
"stop it. "
(quiver)

He hasn't done that in a couple of days. I'm hoping he's over it. It just looks too creepy.

I think it all has to do with his growth and the electrical impulses going on inside him when all his nerves and muscles and bones are getting longer and longer. There have got to be occasional nerve misfires when the network is growing so quickly. I hope so, anyway. It looks very tourettes-y... I half expect him to start shouting curse words randomly.

He complains regularly of his legs hurting. Usually right over his knee at the end of the thigh where the growth plate is. Making new bones, I suppose. I remember the ache in my own legs when I was a kid. It's a lot of work to grow.

He's going to spend the weekend at the lake with my folks. They're all very excited. My mom keeps calling to check on his favorite foods or to remind me to send extra shoes and videos. Grayson asks me every morning, first thing, what day it is and then counts forward the days until he gets to go. On Tuesday he asked if I had packed his bag yet. I told him I thought we could risk waiting until Thursday to get that done.

Gray and I will lounge around and drink coffee and watch grown-up movies all weekend. Sleep til all of eight o'clock.

This weekend I will put in my sugar snaps and my onions. Got to have your peas in by St. Patty's day. This means I have a certain amount of raking and clean-up to do, since the beds are still under about a foot of leaves.

I noticed green fuzz on several of the trees in the neighborhood yesterday as I was leaving for work. Those bushes with the orange blooms: I can't remember their names... they're blooming out all over town now, too. And forsythia, of course. There are buds on a couple of my daffodils, and I'm surprised at how many of the tulips came back up from last year. Usually I just get a few spindly ones the second year around. Or the squirrels eat them.

Spring spring spring.

This weekend while Gray was working on repairing the trim on the roof, we opened the bedroom window to what we call "the kitty play-yard." Our bedroom window looks out over the flat roof of the sunroom. When the weather is nice, we open the window and let the cats go out there and explore around outside. Up on the roof they have nowhere to go: there's no route to the ground, and no way for them to get up onto any other roof, so they can be outside while still remaining safely contained away from the six-lane cat flattener of Classen Boulevard.

They love it out there. They spend all day sitting half in and half out of the window, watching the world go by. They prowl around the perimeter of the roof, meowing down at anyone who goes by, and watching the birds intently. This year I'm going to get a planter box and put some rye grass in it out there for them. It's as close as they get to the great outdoors.

The World As We Know It

Windpower.
Every day this week I have seen huge flat-bed trucks hauling the blades for these giant wind turbines north on I-35. Always three, one right after the other, heading for the new windfarms.

This photo was taken at the one at Weatherford on I-40. There are two things we have plenty of here in Oklahoma: land and wind. A match made in heaven.

It's impressive to see them as they drive by: they're enormous! Just a single blade is as long as a tractor-trailer. It might be a little weird to live near a wind farm. At night the aircraft lights on their tops all blink in unison, like some sort of UFO signaling station.

Tonight is Book Club night. The ladies of the club affectionately refer to it as "Wine Club," if that makes the true nature of the event any clearer in your mind. The book of the night is The Cure for Death By Lightning by Gail Anderson-Dargatz. It was good, if not particularly plot-heavy. Much more character driven. But I could still recommend it as a good read. This is not, unfortunately, true of all our book club reads. The last one, frankly, stank. Eat, Pray, Love (Vomit). I hear there are now whole web sites dedicated to actively despising this book. A perfect example of chic lit at its worst. Whiny, weepy self-obsessed blah blah blah.

I'm currently reading Apocalypse 2012, by Lawrence E. Joseph. I have a fascination for End of the World scenarios. I am a complete sucker for those "Mega Death" documentaries on the Discovery channel: SuperVolcano! Mega Flood! Tsuper Tsunami! I love to learn about all the ways we could cease to be. Apocalypse 2012 lines up all the theories, scientific and otherwise, about why 2012 will be a life-changing, if not life-ending year for the Earth. End of the Mayan calendar, Crazed Sunspots, Magnetic Pole Reversal, Supervolcano at Yellowstone (one of my personal favorites), and of course, the ever-popular meteor impact. I love this stuff.

Spring?

There are promising and not-so promising signs of impending spring.
Saturday was 70 degrees. Gorgeous weather. I spent a big part of the day weasling up the ground under the live oak in the front yard and planting grass seed. I planted a bunch of johnny jump-up seeds, and a dozen hosta roots in the shady area in the back yard.

There's a bit less of that this year, what with the demise of the bradford pear in the ice storm. Too bad, that, but I'm not really all that big a fan of bradford pears, and now at least I have less shade to deal with.

Anyway, I had to shovel mounds of oak leaves out of the way to plant the hostas, and there were tons of ginormous earth worms in the soil underneath them. BIG fat worms that wriggled like snakes when you picked them up. I called Grayson out to see and hold them. I'm proud that he is not afraid of worms. A lot of kids are. I guess I was when I was a kid. But I taught Grayson from when he was a baby to love earth worms. So I dug holes and planted hostas and handed all the big worms to Grayson. He likes to get several of them and hold them at once and feel their strong squirming in the palm of his hand. I like them, too. They are so alive, so powerful and determined, and you can't even tell heads from tails until they make a break for it and start powering their way back into the earth. No matter how hard or packed or just impenetrable the soil is, they always find a way back in.

Sunday threatened rain all day, but it held off until the evening, when it hit like a freight train. Wind and rain and lightning striking straight down all around. The tornado sirens went off while Grayson was in the bath, and we had a moment there when we thought it might be coming our way, but it went south of us, and didn't turn into a real tornado until later.

So we know it's spring. Tornados. Rain. And worms. I saw the first blossoms budding out on forsythia branches around town this weekend, and just today I saw a couple of flowering trees bursting out in bloom. My neighbors' daffodils bloomed this weekend. Mine never bloom until much later because I'm on the south side of the street and my yard is always in the shade. Their south-facing plants are always way ahead of mine in the spring.

This morning, though... snow. Lots of it. Big white flakes coming down hard by 8:00 and it snowed for a good part of the morning. Nothing stuck, of course, because the ground was too warmed up. It was pretty, though. March snow. Always the prettiest, especially if it sticks around.

It's cold tonight,and windy as hell again, too. I'm ready for spring, but I know March always has to hit us a few more sucker punches before it gives over. I just hope we don't have another dreadful wet summer like we did last year. It was so depressing to wake up day after day in June to rain, rain, rain. I'm an Oklahoma girl, born and bred. I expect 100 degree days in June. I am accustomed to drought and fire warnings by July. You can't just pour that much water on me in summer and not expect damage. It hurt my soul, all that rain in summer. This year I hope it is better. Hot. Dry. The way summer is supposed to be.